On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:40 AM, Pritchard, Charles X. -ND <charles.x.pritchard....@disney.com> wrote: > is there a means to coerce data written as byte[] into String (and the other > way around) ?
Not easily today. Binary string values are a subset of bytes (those that are valid UTF-8 sequences), so string to bytes would be a lossless conversion. Bytes to string however isn't guaranteed to produce valid data. Perhaps we should permit one or both of these as a standard type promotion in: http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/spec.html#Schema+Resolution (Int-to-float and long-to-float are both lossy promotions that we already permit.) In the meantime, the standard Java APIs won't permit this conversion. I posted a patch that adds support for promotion from string to bytes. Would this be useful? If so, please add comments to the issue. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1533 Doug
